Thorne, his long sleep interrupted by the waking and rampaging of the Vampire Queen Akasha, is now driven to find the one who made him, the one he saw in his visions – Maharet, one of the two oldest vampires in the world

He emerges from his icy tomb to seek his own kind – and finds Marius, the Roman, Child of the Millennium, Former Keeper of Those Who Must be Kept. And avid biogorapher – who recounts his history to the Norse vampire

Thorne emerges from his centuries of sleep, trying to find answers, trying to find his creator, trying to find some explanation for what happened in the vampire world. At first it seems lucky that he runs into Marius, ancient roman vampire who knows all the answers, but as he’s taken to Marius’s home he realises the dreadful truth… he had fallen into the hands of The Biographer Vampires and their Endless Exposition.

Despite having known Marius for less than a few hours, this poor vampire is then subjected to Marius’s entire 2,000 year old life story (as an added bonus, he also tucks in the story of Eudoxia, a vampire he met along the way). I honestly think these books aren’t even trying to come up with a plausible explanation for why these vampires feel a need to info-dump their entire histories with the most purple of prose – just randomly dropping it on a stranger will do now. Thorne wanted to know about the events of Queen of the Damned, it would have taken exactly 10 minutes to sum up the (limited) plot of that book! No-one asked you your life story, Marius!

To be fair, though, this is one of the better interminably long, over-detailed biographies in the series because a) Marius is a relatively relevant character and b) we get a good sense of him in this book which we haven’t seen elsewhere (unlike, say, The Vampire Armand which was repetitive and added nothing new).

We get a good insight into Marius’s character as time and again he repeats the same patterns – Marius needs company. Not just vampire company (though for much of his existence he seems to need or crave a vampire companion), but human company as well especially when he was younger (relatively speaking), often throwing open his home for people to join him in parties and salons – far more so. In some ways he’s very much a product of his time and place: he’s a Roman. He’s very civilised, very social and, tellingly, pretty arrogant. Which is a wonderful repeated sense I get of Marius which is well done because I get this sense while seeing through Marius’s eyes AND without Marius himself conceding the point. But Marius is Roman, the civilised man in the world of barbarians who need to be educated. From a young age he was entrusted with the duty of keeping Akasha and Enkil safe and repeatedly drank Akasha’s blood making him much much stronger than pretty much every vampire he met. There’s a lot of fuel to that arrogance but once you see it, it puts everything else into a whole new context with Marius.

Like the vampires he always has with him – he says he likes to be a teacher, but ultimately with both vampires and humans he wants to be the AUTHORITY – teacher, mentor, patron, father-figure (and lover at same time because it’s the Vampire Chronicles) up to and including his latest companion. Everyone is subservient to him, every vampire has had to look up to him or been in a weaker position than him – and any vampire who argued with him gets a completely disproportionate response from him: Pandora, Mael, when Armand defied him (and a great deal of Marius’s distrust of Armand seems to stem as much from his unwillingness to follow exactly the path Marius laid down as anything else), any vampire he has been with. He even has a completely childish snit with and Mael because they won’t take on Zenobia – who Marius has no time or inclination for; never once considering that if he didn’t want to take on a student then maybe nor did they? In turn it raises a question about why Marius wants humans around him – is it a desire for civilised company? Or is it a need for an entourage to lord it over?

It also puts into context the semi-frequent disasters that blight Marius’s life – is it because he’s too close to humanity? Is it because his overarching obsession with Those Who Must be Kept distracts him? Or is because, as we see hinted at over and over, the arrogant Marius is too careless and too sure in his own abilities to take precautions?

Marius is by far one of my favorite vampires, however this book took me forever to get through. I'm not sure if that is because it was slow, or because of what's going on in my outside life... The first half, talking about his paintings and the good years of his life, was amazing. The second half seemed slow.

***************(Spoiler alert)***************

His scene with Pandora, expressing his love to her and making all of the promises he made was absolutely BREATHTAKING. And very similar to things I myself have said in the past. Beautiful. Loved it. Wish the chapter had been longer...

This one was pretty good and wasn't near as preachy as the last one of hers I had read. Unfortunately, they've just become too repetitive and formulaic. Unless she writes another witch one, I think I'm done with her. No more vampires for me. ( )

Blood and Gold by Anne Rice is part of her Vampire Chronicles series. The majority of the book is just recounting the events of the life of the vampire Marius. I found a lot of the book to be repetitive. Many of the events described were things that were told of in previous books in the series, though I suppose it was somewhat different being told from a different viewpoint. Still I found it somewhat tedious to be rereading the same stories again. There were new stories in the book from Marius' life that did keep me interested, but I felt like way too much time was spent on stuff that had been gone over in previous books. While the new material was interesting/entertaining to read about, I'm not really sure it added much to the series and it felt a bit superfluous to me. I ended up rating the book with three stars, and I'd probably only recommend it to those who are big fans of Anne Rice's vampire books and really like the characters of Marius, Armand, and Pandora. ( )

Wikipedia in English (2)

The Vampire Chronicles continue with Anne Rice's spellbinding new novel, in which the great vampire Marius returns.

The golden-haired Marius, true Child of the Millennia, once mentor to The Vampire Lestat, always and forever the conscientious foe of the Evil Doer, reveals in his own intense yet intimate voice the secrets of his two-thousand-year existence.

Once a proud Senator in Imperial Rome, kidnapped and made a "blood god" by the Druids, Marius becomes the embittered protector of Akasha and Enkil, Queen and King of the vampires, in whom the core of the supernatural race resides.

We follow him through his heartbreaking abandonment of the vampire Pandora. Through him we see the fall of pagan Rome to the Emperor Constantine and the horrific sack of the Eternal City itself at the hands of the Visigoths.

Bravely, Marius seeks a new civilization in the midst of glittering Constantinople, only to meet with the blood drinker Eudoxia. We see him ultimately returning to his beloved Italy, where after the horrors of the Black Death, he is restored by the beauty of the Renaissance. We see him become a painter living dangerously yet happily among mortals, giving his heart to the great Botticelli, to the bewitching courtesan Bianca, and to the mysterious young apprentice Armand.

Moving from Rome to Florence, Venice, and Dresden, and to the English castle of the secret scholarly order of the Talamasca, the novel reaches its dramatic finale in our own time, deep in the jungle where Marius, having told hi slife story, seeks some measure of justice from the oldest vampires in the world.

Time heals all wounds, unless, of course, you're a vampire. Cuts may heal, burns vanish, limbs reattach, but for the "blood god," the wounds of the heart sometimes stay open and raw for centuries. So it is for Marius, Anne Rice's oft-mentioned and beloved scholar. We've heard parts of his tale in past volumes of the Vampire Chronicles, but never so completely and never from his own lips. In Blood and Gold, Rice mostly (but not entirely) avoids the danger of treading worn ground as she fills out the life and character of Marius the Lonely, the Disenchanted, the Heartsick--a 2,000-year-old vampire "with all the conviction of a mortal man."

Plucked from his beloved Rome in the prime of his life and forced into solitude as keeper of the vampire queen and king, Marius has never forgiven the injustice of his mortal death. Thousands of years later, he still seethes over his losses. Immortality for Marius is both a blessing and a curse--he bears "witness to all splendid and beautiful things human," yet is unable to engage in relationships for fear of revealing his burden.

New readers to the Chronicles may wish for a more fleshed-out, less introspective hero, but Rice's legions of devoted fans will recognize Blood and Gold for what it is: a love song to Marius the Wanderer, whose story reveals the complexities and limitations of eternal existence. --Daphne Durham

Marius, the former mentor to the vampire Lestat, tells his story, which begins in the ancient Roman Empire when he is made a "blood god" by the Druids and follows him through the darkest, bloodiest centuries of European history.